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Why Skyrim's Stormcloaks Are Racist (And Why YouTube Retrospectives Miss the Point)

Lengthy videogame retrospectives are the norm rather than the exception these days. Games like Skyrim now have 20 hour retrospectives that, while generally being of exceedingly high quality and enjoyable to watch, got me thinking about a controversial topic: Race in videogames.  Just how are videogame retrospectives and race are related? To me it has to do with  who  is creating these retrospectives and  how  this impacts their analysis of games. It's not controversial to say that most of the YouTubers creating these retrospectives are white men without degrees in history or related analytical disciplines. Even so, they present their conclusions with the confidence of a scholars speaking from the pulpit of an Ivy League lecture hall.  When it comes to discussing topics like race and racism, I believe they are lacking some nuance in their analysis.  A select few of these retrospective creators are so confident that they've begun weaving critic...
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Tales of Arise Review: Why It's Worth Playing (Despite Its Flaws)

  Shionne (left) and Alphen (right), the game's main characters. Warning: Spoilers Ahead These days I don't have much time, so it's rare that I finish long sprawling RPGs like  Tales of Arise . But finish it I did, and so I figured I'd take the time to jot down some of the thoughts on the game. To sum up, my initial impressions were very positive. I liked the protagonist, I liked the graphics, and I found the combat to be a nice improvement over the last  Tales  game I played,  Tales of Vesperia  (admittedly I have not finished this one).  As the game wore on, I ran into several roadblocks that tend to arise (sorry) in most Japanese RPGs (or JRPG for short): the enemies got tougher, requiring some grinding. The bosses had overinflated health pools, and money and other important battle items like  Arise 's equivalent of health potions became scarce. Maybe I am less dedicated than the average gamer these days, but I felt obligated to buy the double ...

King Philip's War: A Review of Schultz and Tougias' History

  The Battle of Bloody Brook, September 18th, 1675 Editor's note: Parenthetical citations with associated page numbers are provided where necessary. In the late 1990s historians became re-interested in writing about seventeenth century New England's bloodiest conflict: King Philip's War (1675-1676). In 1999 alone, the following books were published: Jill Lepore's  The Name of War,  James D. Drake's  King Philip's War: Civil War in New England 1675-1676 , and finally, the subject of this article, Schultz and Tougias'  King Philip's War: The History and Legacy of America's Forgotten Conflict .  All of these books emphasized different aspects of the war. Lepore analyzed seventeenth and eighteenth century literature on King Philip's War to show that English colonizers wrote of it in a way that exonerated themselves of the violence they committed against Native Americans. Drake looked to the decades prior to the war, arguing that colonizers and Native...

Voting Rights in America: The Legacy of Disenfranchisement

  Editor's note: This article is based on a talk delivered by Professor Gregory Downs in 2017.  In 2013, the Shelby v. Holder U.S. Supreme Court decision gave states permission to change their election laws without needing advance clearance from the Department of Justice. This decision invalidated a portion of the 1965 Voting Rights Act, which required preclearance with the DoJ to protect voters of color. Most people might ask: How did we get to this point? But history professor Gregory Downs (UC Davis) believes this as the wrong question. The United States, he argues, has never been a country where the government guaranteed the right to vote. Indeed, the United States is a country with a tradition of disenfranchisement, rather than enfranchisement. In his talk titled “Voting Rights Under Fire,” Downs argued that U.S. history could be defined by the struggle to expand and retract the vote. Far from being a recent development, “challenging registration laws and low voter turnou...

The White Woman's Slave Market: Black Wet Nurses and Reproductive Violence

  In a talk entitled “‘She could spare one ample breast for the profit of her owner’: White Mothers and Enslaved Wet Nurses’ Invisible Labor in American Slave Markets,” Assistant Professor of History Stephanie Jones-Rogers of UC Berkeley argued that studying enslaved wet nurses reveals white women’s complicity in expanding slavery in the south and demonstrates how white mothers were at the forefront of these market transactions. White southern women had created a “niche sector of the slave market” dedicated to providing them with the specific maternal labor that they sought from bondswomen. Jones-Rogers emphasized that we cannot forget about the reproductive and maternal violence white women perpetrated against black bondswomen. Indeed, the commodification of slave mothers provides an important example of the disturbing “quotidian” horrors of slavery.

Why Cody Deserves to Win America's Favorite Player (Big Brother 19)

Let me begin by saying that I honestly don't know why I am still watching Big Brother 19. Is it masochism? Addiction? A mix of the two? Possibly. Truth be told, I've always been a fan of the game, but this year's houseguests are making it difficult to forge ahead to the season finale. So I'll keep it short and sweet: this article proposes one solution to salvaging a season marred by vile houseguests: ensuring that Cody wins America's Favorite Player. Why, you ask, does Cody deserve to win what would essentially be 3rd place? Well, here's why:

Gordon Ramsay vs. The Food Network: Why One Chef Reigns Supreme

  Ah, Gordon Ramsay. Why do we love him? Is it the way he styles his platinum blonde hair? The Grand Canyon-esque creases in his forehead? The way he says "bollocks"? I could go on, probably for a couple paragraphs. In the end, the fact of the matter is that Mr. Ramsay is one of the coolest food-related dudes on TV; so awesome, in fact, that he makes watching the Food Network a dull and practically painful affair. I mean, I  do  give the Food Network points for hiring their own Ramsay-lite in the form of Robert Irvine. Still, you can't just throw another hot-tempered British dude in my face and think he'll have the same wondrous affect as the steely blonde maven pictured above.

From Skeptic to Believer: A Google Nexus 7 Review

  I recently bought a Google Nexus 7, and love it so far. For you to understand how I got to this point though, I'll need to start from the beginning... I was always a skeptic when it came to owning a tablet. In fact, I held fast to the idea that they were pointless. Until now. It all started in 2010 when Apple came out with the iPad. It seemed to me like a nice toy to play around with. A luxury item that the wealthy could flaunt in the faces of the rest of us while they gleefully loaded up Angry Birds on the morning train to work. In other words, nothing that had any practical use. I just didn't get it. A 10 inch fragile screen that does everything a budget laptop can do, for twice the cost. On top of all that, it lacked a keyboard, so it would be useless for word documents and taking notes. As someone who often finds themselves in a classroom, I did not find that at all attractive. Flash forward two years, and my perspective has reversed. This is mainly due to two reasons: th...

The Witcher Review: Why You Shouldn't Skip the First Game

                  I will be honest in saying that I let the sentiment of the general public get to me when it came to choosing whether or not to play The Witcher. Indeed, I had assumed that this game wasn't worth playing mainly because of what I had read about it on the internet. After paying the huge sum of $2.50 for The Witcher: Director's Cut, I fired the game up and expected something that, as I had read from reviews online, was unpolished, had a horrible combat system, and lacked in so many other areas that I would be convinced to skip it entirely and play The Witcher II instead. Thirty hours into the game, I can tell you that most of these accusations are overblown or downright incorrect, and that it would be a severe mistake to pass up on the first Witcher just because the second one is an improvement. First off, one of the primary complaints I heard of this game was that it had amateurish voice over dialogue. While it is important to ...